Wednesday, November 15, 2006

This announcement from LibLime, the support company for the open-source Koha library system.

LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries, announced today that the Nelsonville Public Library System in Athens Ohio has just gone live with Koha ZOOM, and they couldn't be more pleased. Koha ZOOM includes a powerful, full- featured search engine based on Zebra, a high-performance indexing and retrieval engine. Koha ZOOM catapults Koha into the big leagues, improving standards-compliance, eliminating scalability limitations, and offering some of the most advanced searching technologies available. For those libraries who have been waiting for an open-source ILS that rivals the expensive proprietary systems, the wait is over. Koha ZOOM is a true enterprise-class ILS, suitable for even the largest of collections.

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And what makes Koha ZOOM so great? "After extensive usability testing, we realized that what patrons and staff really wanted was search behavior and interface that behaves like the successful commercial sites such as Amazon.com and Google," says LibLime's President, Technology and Koha Release Manager Joshua Ferraro. "In short, staff and patrons need an intuitive search that can practically read minds. A tall order, but that's exactly what we ended up accomplishing". As one NPL staffer put it: "This Koha upgrade is top-notch. I don't think I've ever had an easier time searching for items for our patrons."